Living in the Land of Fire and Ice

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens~Gimli (J.R.R. Tolkien)0000000000

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

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As promised I’ve decided to write a post about the more mundane and slightly less exciting aspects of living in “The Land of Fire and Ice.” The goal of this post isn’t to give an in-depth look at Icelandic culture or lifestyle. Heck, it’s not even really to provide a day-in-and-day-out account of being a ferner’ here. There are plenty of travel blogs that can do such a thing far more adeptly than I can. Instead I’m just going to ramble about a few things that we’ve been doing and encountered since moving here 3 months ago. Like anything in life there is some good, some bad, and some downright weird. Unlike a lot of my posts which have at least a semblance of a narrative, this time I’m just going to type things as I think of them (which is itself a result of which pictures I chose). So not everything here is chronological, nor does one thing necessary flow conceptually to the other. However I’ll try to keep my rambling structured to some extent! 🙂

So what happened once we got settled? Well, a lot. Not the least of which I found out that I passed the bar, and we also went on our first in-country trip. However, a lot of “easier to miss” things also happened. We had to do things like find out where a grocery store was, and once there, figure out what milk was. You’d think that would be easy but we ended up with an entire jug of yogurt (true story). We also found out really quickly that just because you recognize a brand, does not mean that that brand is going to be what you expect it to be. Case in point, a lot of the cereal is way different.0000000000

Mmm, delicious rugs with fras.

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Sure we’d both lived abroad before, but that time around we were part of a program (especially SB) so there was a bit of hand-holding involved. This was a full-fledged plop down into a country of which you don’t even know how to say “Hello.” The result is that things have been interesting (in both good and bad ways). For instance I once opened what I thought was a stall in the restroom to find a mini-kids bathroom all self-contained inside of the stall.0000000000

So when I say that we often don’t know what is going to be behind the next door, I mean that literally. As in, we can’t even read anything but the most basic of signs. I once also went into what I thought was a computer lab, only to realize I’d stumbled into the 9th circle of hell and it was a lab full of Macs. I still have PTSD.

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However, the good news is that SB is actually learning a bit of Icelandic. Partially because of her job at a preschool and partially because she is taking a basic Icelandic course through the university. I, however, am making less strides as my work doesn’t expose me to Icelandic, nor am I taking a class in it. I’m getting some of it just from constant exposure, but I wouldn’t really say that I’m actively learning it, as it’s more of a passive absorption. The last remnants of my German help some, but sometimes they cause more problems than they solve because it’s FAR from a 1:1 linguistic comparison.

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Still, all the confusion from the language aside, life is fairly normal. At least as normal as life can be when you live right across the street from an airport and a construction site.

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The construction site actually doesn’t bother us. In fact I’m probably going to make a post just about the construction site at some point in the future. However, in the meantime don’t be surprised if it sneaks into posts semi-frequently. It is a fairly big part of our existence after all. We’ve named all the workers and the machines and created an entire story, it helps deal with the jackhammers starting at 7:55 am.

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Of course “life as normal” also means that we can’t just enjoy living in Iceland and being students. Lots of a boring life stuff still has to happen. For instance, shortly after moving here my computer just shut off one night. Just, boom, dead. This is the same computer that I’d just paid $600 between shipping and customs for – a 4 year old computer no less (I later found out that the computer wasn’t supposed to have customs paid on it, but of course they didn’t tell me that). Anyways, I’m decent with computers and I knew enough to know this wasn’t something minor. So the tinkering began.

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After a few hours of poking, prodding, and dismantling I came to the conclusion that it was either the power supply (PSU) or the graphics card (GPU). Naturally, being in Iceland meant that regardless of which one it was, I was going to pay about 50-80% more than I would have if the same part had broken before I moved. That said, the GPU would be much easier to replace than the PSU because my particular computer uses a server-rack style PSU, whereas the GPU is just a standard make.

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So the first thing to come out for testing was the PSU.

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And from there we next went to the GPU for testing.0000000000

The good news is that it ended up being the GPU that had bit the dust. This was the first time ever I’d had a GPU die on me – wonderful. So I went about figuring out how to get a new one, and despite my best efforts I ultimately decided that I’d just need to buy one in a brick-and-mortar store here to get the best price (due to customs + shipping). However, I soon found that there were no stores within walking distance that carried computer hardware. Fortunately, I was able to use the free shuttle to Smáralind (mall) which leaves from City Hall to get within about 10 minutes walking distance of a computer hardware store. I guess the one lucky thing was that it happened before the shuttle stopped running for the season. So, thanks to a bit of leeching from the mall shuttle I was able to acquire a new GPU.

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Of course I paid over $100 more for it than I would have even in the more expensive stores in the U.S., but in my life when it comes to my desktop there are two options 1) I have my Desktop 2) I end up on the FBI’s (or I guess Lögregla’s these days) most wanted list.

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Installing the GPU was a bit of a chore since I have what is called a “small form factor” (SFF) case. But I managed without breaking anything.0000000000

Now, life being life, that wasn’t the only expensive thing that broke. As I mentioned before our camera lens also decided to break at some point. We had purchased the additional coverage when we bought it, but because we are abroad it turned into a massive shit-show to get them to honor the warranty. The end result is that we had to pay $50 to get someone to say “Yep, it’s broke.” Then pay $30 to send it to the warranty people so they could say “Yep, it’s broke.”

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Happy Icelandic boxes for sad broken camera lenses and other goodies.

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All for them to not replace it anyways. In the end we managed to recover about 1/2 of what we paid for the lens, which does us little good here since the same lens costs literally 2.5x as much in Iceland. We also are down a suitcase, because one of them got damaged too – oh and they didn’t replace that either.

Back to the living situation. Which is to say, back to the construction yard.

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And early morning (and late night) jack-hammering. Or as better reference of what morning currently looks like:

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That is about 8:30am, for reference.

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Also, and by late night I do mean late-night.0000000000

Ok so that photo was actually at like 6 o’clock, but more about the ENCROACHING DARKNASS in a bit. Besides, Pigsten might get angry at me if I discuss his “secret” construction site too much just yet.

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So living, yeah, it’s living! The boys are still as crazy as ever.

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Actually Valentino is a little more crazy than usual. We think it’s the newfound proximity to the Arctic Circle that is causing him to go a bit feral. Polar Bears can be dangerous yo’.

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We also live in a giant concrete bunker. No seriously, a lot of the buildings here look like they were built to withstand being shelled. While Iceland hasn’t been subjected to much in the way of shelling (outside of Red Storm Rising, anyways) it gets absolutely shitter-blasted by the more natural elements. As such, a lot of the buildings look like ass but when your existence consists of 365 days of wind blowing things into you sideways, I guess you sort of need solid construction.

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Our building also has grass growing on the roof. No seriously.

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It’s actually fairly common here, it’s also a good idea. In our case there’s so much grass that they even have to come mow it.

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It looks much nicer when it’s mowed.

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Naturally a lot the clipped grass ended up pilled up in the walk ways, or bunched up on our welcome mat. That was a kind of a pain. The street cleaner did come clean up everything in the street though, which was neat (except for Clifford, he hates street cleaners for some reason that we have never understood).

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Speaking of plants, Iceland doesn’t have much in the way of trees. I mean, I guess this isn’t a huge surprise. The environment itself isn’t conducive to tall vegetation (see wind), but a lot of the forests that were here got chopped down by the Vikings a long time ago. So most of the vegetation you see scattered around was intentionally (re)planted, and even then there isn’t a ton of variety in the trees. The cool thing is that while evergreens are definitely popular, a fair chunk of the trees are actually seasonal – which means you still get fall colors (even if nothing like New England). For example, here’s a photo from a bit ago showing some trees on campus just starting to change.0000000000

All those leaves are completely gone now, and have been for awhile – which is a bit more depressing. However, the change was fairly gradual in the leaves, so we had a few good weeks of colors!0000000000

We also had a crazy explosion of mushrooms around us! There for a week or two mushrooms were everywhere!

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I’m pretty sure Pig has since ate them all.

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In other plant news, we acquired three buddies to liven up our apartment!

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Yep! SB found someone who was getting ready to move and couldn’t take their plants, so we got them! They are three aloe plants, and their names are from left to right: Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi – none of which are pronounced the way you probably think they are. 🙂

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They live on the little table where our router is, right next to our big balcony windows. We won’t be able to take plants with us (which is why we didn’t even consider bringing any of our current buddies) so we were mixed on whether to get any here, but I’m glad SB got them! So much happier with plant friends. They seem to be doing well, as they are just babies. Their biggest threat in the beginning was a certain porcine predator.0000000000

Yes, Poor Pig, he wanted to eat them so bad. But he got scalded and then had a big ole’ piggy pout.

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However he’s since came to understand that Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi are friends, and not for eating. We feed him lots of oat biscuits from Bónus (our regular grocery store, featuring a pig mascot!) to keep him happy too, which probably helps.

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The Boys also like the rainbows. Like I mentioned before, rainbows are pretty constant thing here – and even manage to crop up on otherwise icky days.

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Sometimes you get lucky and can see almost the full arc, complete with Icelandic leprechauns (i.e. gnomes) at the end.

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I guess rainbows are a good segue into the weather in general, which is itself tied to the rising tides of darkness. A good bit ago we woke one morning to a little bit of snow on Esja in the distance.

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That was pretty much the beginning of the dark times. Since then we’ve been losing daylight, and fast. As an example, take this photo from around 9:00am from October 11th.

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A decent amount of light, right?

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Welp it’s still dark now. Heck, when I get up at 6:20 – 6:40 the northern lights are still out, and at 8:00am if feels more like 3am than 8:00am. I mean, seriously, it’s pitch black – and when you manage to pull yourself out of bed you know you’ve got hours more of darkness ahead of you. That’s only going to keep getting worse for the next 1.5 months. SB and I are not especially excited about that. In fact the darkness has really been the only thing that’s been hard about living here. Second to that is probably the fact that online shopping basically doesn’t exist, lol.

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The Fall has also brought some crazy wind. Yes it’s raining, but that’s normal. It rains so much you just sort of forget it’s raining. It’s also usually windy, but this had been some hardcore wind.

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SB and I have lived in windy places since 2010, each progressively more windy than the last. Here the wind is so bad that literally all the lines (power, etc.) have to be underground. Plus, I’ve walked through some Nor Easters, and those definitely, definitely sucked – however, there was a wind storm here a few weeks ago where I legitimately thought I could have glided if I jumped in the air. It was picking outdoor furniture up and moving it – for real, and I don’t mean plastic lawn chairs, I mean furniture. We couldn’t open our windows or balcony door – as in, we physically couldn’t open them due to the wind pressure. It was bonkers. Yet the planes still came into the domestic airport. Sure they were (literally) landing sideways, but one thing I’ve noticed about the Icelandic and Greenlandic pilots that we get to watch at the airport is that they give no shits. This isn’t the international airport down in Keflavík (you don’t actually fly into Reykjavík from most places – we didn’t either). We live near the domestic airport, which is obviously domestic, but also handles a lot of Greenland flights.

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Those arctic pilots don’t care. “Oh lookee there 500mph winds, nuclear fallout, a Russian invasion, Y3K, herpes, and a vortex to hell – no worries we’ll just land upside down, sideways, while simultaneously on fire and frozen.”

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One night it was bad, yet here comes the ole’ 1947 prop plane from Greenland, just flying in there sideways like a boss because peeps gotta have their noms. I like watching them. Heck, I think if the one of the volcanoes erupt again these guys will just fly into it, because that’s a shortcut to Australia.

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But alas, not all of us were born with the stock of arctic pilots. So instead we hide inside with our tasty coffee.

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Yes it should come as no surprise that SB and I purchased a French Press within the first 10 hours of being in Iceland. 🙂

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We’ve also found a brand of oat milk from Sweden called Oatly which is super delicious with both hot and coldbrew coffee!

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In other food news, we’ve been eating a lot of lamb. Whereas chicken had traditionally been our staple, chicken is INSANELY expensive here (~$23 for a pack o’ tendies), it’s now become lamb and fish, because lamb is decently cheap and fish is well.. still expensive, but comparatively less so. We’ve also been eating a lot of eggs, because eggs are cheap despite chicken flesh being expensive.

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In fact the expense of food has limited us quite a bit. For example, we no longer really go “out” on our Friday Date Nights. It can legitimately be $25 per person, with no drinks, to eat – and that’s just a hamburger place. If you add in beers, then god have mercy on your soul. Really you should plan to spend $30-40 per person at your average place. For instance SB and I went out once, got 2 beers and an appetizer and it was like $36 during Happy Hour. Yeap.

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So, in order to make up for our inability to go “out” we now go to the store and get something special for dinner. This something is normally boxed pizza, because it’s cheap and decently good. We’ve, of course, also continued our tradition of getting a Friday night treat as well! The treat is much more variable, though one thing we’ve found that is super yummy are these mini-cinnamon rolls.

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There is also a local chocolate company with the awesome name of Omnom Chocolate Factory that we’ve had a few times, but like most things their candy is really pricey. We actually want to go do the factory tour, but even that is really expensive.

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Still, we don’t let finances stop us from exploring culinary stuff entirely, and besides we’ve found a few cheap things to try out. A good example is lakkrís (licorice). Icelanders seem to love their lakkrís, it exists as everything – to the point that even lakkrís ice-cream seems normal. However, there is one thing you have to be careful about with their lakkrís. Some of it contains ammonium chloride (sound familiar?) – for realsies. For example, take Opal – a super popular traditional Icelandic lakkrís.

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If you get the red box, you can prepare yourself for lakkrís pellets that taste like cough drops. Not too bad, but nothing you’d be clamoring to consume either. HOWEVER, should you get the green box…

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…well then, let’s just say that some stones are best left unturned.

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The good news is that some of the lakkrís is absolutely delicious.

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That package is quite good. I mean, it’s licorice (read: not Twizzlers or Red Vines) so if you don’t like licorice-licorice you won’t like it, but I happen to be a fan of licorice (just not, you know, licorice laced with Borax).

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Of course if licorice isn’t your thing, they also have lots of non-lakkrís candies, as shown by Pigsten.

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And, if I’m going to mention food and candy, then I have to mention beer.

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If there is one thing I have to say about beer in Iceland it’s this: prepare thyself for poverty. Alcohol in general is more expensive here than anyplace else I’ve ever been (with the exception of Kaktovik). If you are eating out (and not in a happy hour), don’t be surprised if you pay $14 for a beer, and if you want to head to the store for a six-pack, prepare to spend about $25 for the six-pack, and that’s just for normal beer, not the fancy stuff.0000000000

Which brings me to my next point, the state regulates the sale of booze, so you have to go to state-owned liquor stores to buy real alcohol. These stores are called Vínbúðin, and there are about 48 of them in the entire country. Outside of those stores, you’ll be forced to go out (and pay $14 for a beer) or go to the store and buy “near-beer.” Near beers are those.. uh.. near beers, which range from 0.0% to around 2.5% ABV. These “beers” also range in quality from “I’d rather be in a gulag” to “Pretty decent.” One of them holds the title of being the worst beer I’ve ever had in my life, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

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Point being, a lot of what I get is these “near-beers,” and that’s for two reasons. First, price. You can get a big can of near-beer for as low as 99 cents. Second, availability. I can walk 2 minutes and get a near-beer. Getting to the closest Vínbúðin requires significantly more effort. Plus they randomly drive their cars on the sidewalks here while parking (no really). That said, a Taco cannot survive on near-beer alone, so occasional trips to Vínbúðin are a must.

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They have a pretty good stock of local, European, and Murkan’ beers at the locations we’ve been too. Of course they are expensive, but beer is life. As far as quality goes, Icelandic beers have been good. Anymore I don’t think any one country has beer on lock-down. I think it’s more brewer-to-brewer since the micro-boom. I’ve had a couple that were really good, and then I’ve had some that were meh. Just like any other place. The moral of the story is that there is plenty of good beer here, I just can’t afford most of it. 🙂

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But for those I do purchase, I even have a special little shelf – that’s how important they are to me.

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In reality I have to keep them in there because our refrigerator is the size of a shoebox. But hey, that doesn’t stop us from telling stories on it with magnets!

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Indeed, our apartment has a lot of quirks. From the Scandinavian-style shower that really isn’t a shower in the traditional sense, to the cabinets designed for giants, to water pressure that will rip your skin off, to the tiny little sink that gives you a bath (NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO) due to said water pressure. Yes, when coupled with the fact that we pulled most of our furniture out of the basement or trash area, it’s been an interesting time.

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I think the most interesting thing has been our bed. That’s a story that deserves to be told.

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Before we arrived we had decided that for both practical and cost-related reasons that we were going to forgo a bonafide bed and that we were going to try to get futon/pad/thing instead. This ended up being more difficult than we anticipated, because there are certain things that Iceland just doesn’t have (like folders, I’m legitimately serious, they don’t have normal folders here). It also got expensive, really quick, and after a bunch of frustration and two trips to IKEA we managed to cabbage together a bed unlike any bed I’ve ever had before.

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Yes, you are seeing that correctly.

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Our bed is a cheap futon pad, which has literally been cut into two pieces with scissors. Then, we mashed a bunch of plastic into wads and shoved that between the pads. Then we stuck a mattress pad on top of that, and then put a sheet on that and called it a bed. Yep. We also have one single comforter-type thing, no sheets. It’s most definitely janky, but it works.

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You may be wondering why the plastic? Well, that’s because the mattress pad alone wasn’t enough padding, and then the futon pad wasn’t big enough, so the mattress pad hung way over the edges. So you’d roll off the bed. So in order to fix that we could either spend $100 more for another pad, or get creative. I might be going for a post-doc, but a completely helpless academic I am not. I took some plastic out of the trash, rolled and taped dat’ shit up, and boom, bedtime. It’s been working for 3 months now, don’t hate.

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Now, the bed itself is decently comfy (one must have realistic expectations when sleeping on plastic and destroyed furniture). However, the sleep I get here is consistently the worst of any apartment SB and I have ever had. This is due to a couple of things. First, we have no fan. I’ve been sleeping with a fan for about 12 years now. A standard box-fan will run you $75+ dollars here (and you have to find it in the first place, fans aren’t really growing on trees in feckin’ Iceland). SB does have a rain app on her phone that helps some, but it’s not the same.

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The second reason, and the WAY more enraging one, is that we are surrounded by undergrads (in fact there is a party going on while I write this). Honestly I don’t feel like I need give any further explanation. To make matters worse, Iceland follows the Europe drinking culture of “Drink at home until 11:30pm then go out.” That sounds good on its surface, right? You’d think that it meant that the loud parties stopped around that time. The truth is not really. Generally at least one group will “stay in” which is all it takes for things to stay loud. Then, around 3am – 4am (or later) you get everyone rolling back in and seemingly playing an entire f*cking game of soccer in their apartment while wearing plate-mail armor and hitting the walls with sledgehammers. It’s insane. Like I explained, this building is basically solid concrete and steel. I can jump up and down on the floor and barely make any noise – yet these people scream and bang so loudly that it sounds like they are in your apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning – and this just isn’t on party days, this EVERY DAMN DAY. In fact, sometimes they are so loud you can hear them over SB’s phone rain AND the ear plugs you are wearing. Yes, I have to wear earplugs to sleep – almost every damn night. It appears to be giving me a nearly constant ear ache in my right ear too. It is TOTALLY AWESOME.

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To be fair to the building as a whole (but not really, they’re all loud), it seems like we got totally screwed with the luck of the draw. Of our entire building, the two loudest apartments are on each side of us – and that’s not just because we’re between them. You can literally walk to the other side of the building and it’s still those two apartments you hear. Then I’m convinced the people above us set off TNT charges randomly at 2am, that or ICBMs are randomly hitting the roof of the building. I have no idea what the flying f*ck they are doing, but they’ve legitimately got to have a bulldozer up there or something.

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But hey, at least the people below us don’t make much noise [Edit: nope, the day I posted this they apparently decided to open a blasting zone in their apartment at 2am – this is why I can’t say nice things on my blog]. But hey T-Rex that lives in their window also turned out to be a light!

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So yeah. Knowing what I know now I can safely say I’d never, ever have chosen these apartments if I’d not been a moron and realized that they would include undergrads. Harvard quarantined the undergrads into their own little hives of misery, Háskóli Íslands does not.

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But I suppose that’s as good as spot as any to shift the discussion to school itself, you know, the whole “fake” reason we came here in the first place. I say fake because SB and I were pretty transparent that moving here had little to do with school, that was more of a residence permit checkbox than anything else. Yet, despite it’s secondary status, it is the thing that eats up most of our existence. So what’s that bit of our life like? Well, I can’t speak for SB, but I can share some of my experiences in my post-doc program.

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First, a little about the school itself.

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Yes, I’m reusing this photo.

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We go to Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland).

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Háskóli Íslands is the largest (and objectively best, because I go there) of the seven schools in Iceland. To best honest I didn’t even realize there were seven, I only ever really hear about four: Háskóli Íslands, Háskólinn á Akureyri, Háskólinn á Bifröst, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík (which is Háskóli Íslands’ rival). Háskóli Íslands (henceforth HI) has something like 13,200 students. It’s by far the largest university in Iceland, but still fairly small by Murkan’ standards where schools like Ohio State have 743,000 students.

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At HI, I unsurprisingly attend the law school, which is technically called the “Faculty of Law” and is located with the “School of Social Sciences.” I have no idea how big the law school itself is, but it’s not big.

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I take a mix of classes (all law), and I’ve noticed a few interesting things. First, grading is on a 0 – 10 scale and they use the European Credit System (ECTS). I don’t understand it. You take like 1 zillion credits, and 1 credit hour doesn’t seem to actually equal 1 hour. For example I have a class that is, by itself, 10 credits – yet I don’t spend no freaking 10 hours a week in that class (not that I’d show up if I was supposed to anyways). Second, written law exams are not as common – they are instead oral and much shorter. Third, despite the lack of written exams, papers are way more popular. Fourth, cold-calling barely exists at all – and if you cold-call an Icelander or one of the European students they seem to die inside. The one exception to this is that I have one professor who does cold call, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he is an HLS graduate (we are cockroaches, I tell you – though it is kinda fun to watch people who’ve never experienced a cold call before fall like dominoes). Fifth, people are way more passive compared to what I am used to. Whereas a simple question could generate deathly blood-feuds at HLS, here it’s more like “Oh you think we should eat babies? Ok.” –> goes back to browsing Facebook. Sixth, hand-raising isn’t a thing. It’s just who can shout the loudest. Seventh – having a better grasp of English than your professors pays HUGE dividends when it comes time to communicate. Sure they can speak 27 languages whereas I speak one, but oh yeah I speak that one better. AMERICA FERK’ YEAR’.

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Blow it out your ass and send them to the God they wish they knew.

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So far things are going well academically. I’ve gotten “First Class” grades in the two classes I’ve got grades for so far (the schedule is weird, I have two classes which are already done) – though to be honest I’m not entirely sure what that translates to, other than that First is better than Second. I’ll probably discuss school more in the future once I’ve finished up the first semester and know more about my timeline. Overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag, it’s not what I thought it would be, with more of a lean towards the negative than the positive, but it’s not bad by any means. I think I’ll be more engaged once I can start focusing on my own research, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later. I mean, doing my own research is the main reason I did this program in the first place. Sitting in a class with people who don’t even have a Masters yet (FILTHY FECKIN’ PLEBS) is not.

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If it wasn’t obvious from my rant about living with undergrads, we live near the school. In truth our commute is pretty freaking awesome. I can be in class in 6 minutes. It’s amazing. Our neighborhood is Vesturbær which is kind of divided by Route 49 (Nesbraut – which at 4 lanes is the largest in the entire country). One one side is HI, construction, houses, 1 tiny overpriced store, and the airport. On the other is all sorts of cool stuff. I’ll let you guess which side we live on. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cross over to cool-side land.

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It’s a pretty neighborhood when the weather is right.

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Plus, like I’ve mentioned before, Tjörnin is right in the middl(ish) of it.

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And with Tjörnin comes duckies, geese, swans, and 9 octrillion seagulls (who are assholes, but still friends).

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It’s a very pretty place, and while our walk-commute to the store is fairly long (especially on the way back with all the groceries), it’s nice that part of the walk takes us through such a pretty area.

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But mostly I just like all the duckies. 🙂

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This area (a bit further from us) also has stuff like the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi – I discussed that part of town a bit more here.

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So that’s kind of a general overview of where we live – in a noisy undergrad-dominated complex, near a construction site, an airport, the university, and across the country’s largest highway from some duckies. I don’t make it sound too great, but really it’s not that bad, we both know I like to whine. Most of the stuff doesn’t bother me, it’s really just undergrads – who, for reference, I still hated while I was one.

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In general, life here is just that, life. SB and I do most of the same things as before, some less-so due to cost, but our general schedule is the same. It’s cold, rainy, and windy – but we do get rainbows! Some stuff is impossible to find (ibuprofen, for example) but there are new things to find, which keeps things exciting – especially when you can’t even read the box. 🙂

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But then there are other things that you wouldn’t expect to find, but do – like pumpkins!

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Yes, despite not traditionally celebrating Halloween, the holiday has started to creep into Icelandic culture (as it should, Halloween = best holiday). We might have ended up getting a pumpkin, but that’s a story for next time. 😉

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All in all, this time in the “Land of Fire and Ice” is definitely a crazy adventure we’ve set out on, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Right now both SB and I are in agreement that the encroaching darkness is the most difficult part about it. We’ve stocked up on Omega 3 + Vitamin D supplements, but at a certain point oppressive blackness is just flat-out depressing (side note: Icelanders consume more antidepressants per capita than any other country in the world). So if you were wondering why I started this post off with that relatively “dark” quote from the Lord of the Rings, it’s because 1) Quoting Tolkien is always relevant (fight me), and 2) the continuous darkness has been the biggest challenge we’ve faced on this adventure so far – but we won’t give up!

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I am many things, and stubborn as holy living shit is one of them. 🙂

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So that’s about that. I rambled a lot, and this post sort of covers a bit of the more mundane and random info I’ve thought about while writing other posts. It also does a good job of setting the current scene, which is full of looming deadlines, fading sunlight, and declining temperatures. Oh yes, winter is coming – we only need to look to the horizon.

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Actually it ended up showing right after I wrote this, but hey, I have a 180 degree view of mountains. So at least I can take in a pristine view while I eat laundry detergent candies, rotten fish, drink my $75 beer, and slowly go insane from endless darkness!

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ICELAND FERK’ YEAR’ – HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, CHECKMATE AMERIFATS

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But really, it’s not too shabby here. Life’s too short to be afraid of the dark.

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Until next time,
-Taco

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[Author’s Note: The formatting got super screwed up on this post for some reason. Because I’m at my wit’s end with such blogging issues, I used a very “lazy” way of fixing it. So if you are observant and tend to read between the lines, know that it’s not you, it’s me. 🙂 ]